Take Your Photography From Passion to Profit

It’s confession time: I think that the majority of pricing guides for photographers are lame.

That’s not to say that they don’t work, or that they aren’t worth the money that people sell them for. It’s just that most of the pricing calculators have some major flaw that makes them not nearly as effective as I think they could be. It’s for this reason that I decided to create an easy and straight-forward photography pricing guide for photographers that shows you how to price photography.

Photography Pricing is one of the most difficult things to determine when running your business.

The market is saturated with people charging hardly anything and doing things irresponsibly. If you know your numbers it can be hard to believe how much more you need to be charging to make what you need to be making. It doesn’t seem possible.

Yet you’re awesome because you are committed to being profitable and are ready to make the leap into the higher prices you deserve. No more pretending you’re making more than you really are, no more excuses. You’re ready to put on your big girl panties and making the leap into running a successful and profitable photography business.

So you raise your prices a lot. And suddenly you hear crickets. Nothing, not even an inquiry. You start to doubt yourself, your work, your ability to stay in business, and you are tempted to either drop your prices back to where they were or quit altogether.

Sound familiar? It doesn’t have to be this way.

So let’s talk this through, let’s do this the smart way, and let’s start making more money and avoiding some common pitfalls.

This post is the final installment of The Modern Tog’s Photographer’s Pricing Guide series. Here’s the link to Part 1 of the Pricing Guide in case you missed it.

If this is the first time working through a pricing guide, you may be shocked at how much you need to charge to make your desired profit. If you are just starting out and still building a portfolio, you may not feel like you have the experience or quality to be charging that amount yet, or maybe you simply do not believe that anyone in your market would be willing to pay those prices.

This post is Part 6 of The Modern Tog’s Photographer’s Pricing Guide series. Here’s the link to Part 1 of the Pricing Guide in case you missed it.

It’s finally time to pull together all the pieces you’ve been working on so far and decide what kind of packages you are going to offer. Before you do this, I highly suggest taking some time to think about your business model. Will you have multiple packages for each type of shoot or do everything a la carte? Or maybe you’ll have one package with several add-on options. Determining how to structure your photography pricing is probably the most difficult part of this step.

Creating Packages

Let’s say that the average amount needed for a portrait shoot is $750. There are several ways that we can get to this number. You can simply charge a session fee and hand over the digital files or you can create a package that includes enough products you offer to get you to the price you need. When you do this, you need to be adding up the Retail Less Costs of Goods. If you use the selected retail amount, you’ll fail to account for the cost of goods and will make less than you should to reach your needed average.

For this example I’m going to create a package completely out of products I offer and not charge an additional session fee. I’ll use the following products as an example.

So if we want a package to be $750 after cost of goods, we can select both the Fine Art Album ($550 Retail Less Cost of Goods) and the Print Collection ($200 Retail Less Cost of Goods) to get us to exactly $750. We’d then have to add up the Selected Retail Price of the items to know what to charge our customers for this package. In this case, we’d have to add $750 and $250 to get $1000, which is what we’d charge our customers to ensure that we’re making $750 after we pay for the album and prints.

Making it easy with the Photographer’s Pricing Guide Workbook

If you’re using the Photographer’s Pricing Guide Workbook, go to the Packages tab at the bottom of the screen. Then enter the name of your package in row 6. Click the cell right below that in row 7 and select the type of shoot from the drop-down menu.

Next, enter a session fee in row 8 if you wish to use one. If not, leave this blank. To add a product to your package, click on a cell and select the desired product from the drop-down list. To add another product to the list, go back to the “Product Pricing” tab (click on it at the bottom of the worksheet) and add it there.

You’ll automatically see the amount needed in row 24, as well as the amount in the package based on what you’ve added so far (row 25). What you’ll want to do is watch the number in row 26, which tells you if you’re under or over the amount you need (a parenthesis around the number means you’re under where you need to be at). My smallest packages are usually slightly below the amount needed, whereas the rest of my packages are about equal or greater than where I need them to be. Your business model should help dictate exactly where you want the packages to be priced in comparison to your average amount needed.

Finally, once your package includes what you want it to include, you’ll see your retail price (what you need to charge your customers) in row 27.

In our next post, we’ll wrap up this series with a discussion about how to take the numbers you’ve just computed and make them work in your market.

Want to see my Wedding & Portrait Packages?

Want to see how I structure my Wedding & Portrait packages? You can see this free as part of the exclusive content I share via email. Simply enter your email below and click the button and I’ll send it right to you.

This post is Part 5 of The Modern Tog’s Photographer’s Pricing Guide series. Here’s the link to Part 1 of the Pricing Guide in case you missed it.

There are many different ways to do pricing for your products that vary based upon what kind of business model you are using. For this pricing guide, we’re going to use the amount of time it takes you to place an order to help determine how much you should be charging in order to make it worth your time.

The benefit of doing it this way is that you are not wasting a bunch of time placing small orders and only making a little bit of money when you could have otherwise have been using that time to shoot more sessions at a higher profit. This makes sure you’ve priced your products so that even small orders are profitable. [Click to read more]

This post is Part 4 of The Modern Tog’s Photographer’s Pricing Guide series. Here’s the link to Part 1 of the Pricing Guide in case you missed it.

So now that you’ve determined how much profit you want to make and how much your expenses will be, it’s time to combine this with how many shoots you plan to do and see how much you need to be charging. If you’ve never done a pricing guide before, this is often the most shocking part for people. It’s also the most math-intensive, but no worries. If you really aren’t comfortable doing the math, you can always pick up the Pricing Guide Workbook and let it do the hard work for you. [Click to read more]

This post is Part 2 of The Modern Tog’s Photographer’s Pricing Guide series. Here’s the link to Part 1 of the Pricing Guide in case you missed it.

Today it’s time to think about one of the main goals of your business: your profit.

The first step in determining your prices is to figure out how much you want to take home in the form of a paycheck. This amount is what is left over after all your expenses and taxes have been taken out.

There’s two ways to go about this process. I highly suggest doing both methods and comparing the results. [Click to read more]